by Harper Fox
Of course it was all a waste of time. The four of us sat in the dingy little living room and listened for a while to the old man’s bitter, corrosive outpourings, then Piers, who had held my hand without concealment since we had arrived, got up and quietly led me away. My brother and his girlfriend followed. She was crying and so, to my astonishment, was he. I gave them both a hug. Piers, with his usual grave kindness, invited them for lunch at our flat. I felt no grief. I was dizzy with release from my ancient bonds, from chains I hadn’t realised were there. The old man didn’t matter. The morning sunshine did, and the smile on my lover’s face as he drove us away, and that was about it.
Apart from my work, though that now came in only a distant third or second, depending on the weather. My thesis proposal had been accepted, with a few raised eyebrows at my change of stance, and all through January I blazed a trail through that and the outline for a book on how the primary figures of the Arthur legends linked into the Jungian archetypes.
My headaches continued. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten my promise to Piers about seeing a doctor, just that I’d been so busy and contented, between my new projects and his bed—not to mention the happy chaos of our move to a shared flat—that the pain seemed unimportant, a small price to pay, and I let the issue slide. He, however, was learning to deal with me by then, and he wasn’t afraid to use weapons. In this case it was Gwen’s girlfriend, a recently qualified doctor, who knocked me down on a sofa at a party and pinned me between her formidable thighs, sending all kinds of weird thoughts whirling round my head before she pulled out a torch and shone it into my eyes. What she saw there got me admitted to the city hospital’s neurology wards within a week, Piers grim-faced at my side.
The tumour was benign. That was a relative term, the oncologist told me: it was sitting near my optic nerve and within months would have taken out my vision. It was also, she said, pressing on my left temporal lobe—had I not been hallucinating wildly?
It was nestled too deep in the folds of my brain to be dealt with by surgery. There were hours—whole days—in the weeks of radiotherapy that followed when I sincerely wished I’d fallen to my death in the Hallow Hill cave. But Piers remained with me all the way through it, holding my hand or my head, convincing me, by the ferocious power of his own belief, that my decent chances of survival were excellent, unassailable, worth hanging on for.
He was right. I stumbled out of hospital weak as a kitten but free of pain in as long as I could remember. That summer he presented me with a ring to match the one he had never taken off since Christmas, and we got our civil partnership. We still had our issues, still argued black from white on everything from God to kitchen design, but we both had concluded that life was too damn short to mess around. We tied our knot beneath the statue of the ancient God of Tyne in the Civic Centre plaza, the wind-whipped water of his fountain sending spray into our faces and those of our guests. To my astonishment—to my poor other half’s absolute paralysis—his mother turned up. She wept a bucketful during the ceremony, then defied the local byelaws to lurk by the gates and chuck several packets of nonbiodegradable confetti over us as we passed. We were pleased enough to have her blessing. Piers, when he recovered, accorded her belated status as mother of the groom, took her with us to the reception and made sure our mates were civil to her. It was nice to have one family member on-side, but in every way that counted our indifference couldn’t have been greater. All that was over for us both.
We booked a fortnight in Cyprus to honeymoon and let me convalesce a bit after the excitement. I was gaining strength rapidly, but the current came and went and I was still falling asleep in odd places, or setting out for somewhere and finding myself too tired to get back. The promise of fourteen hot days with nothing to do but conserve my energies for the hot nights was irresistible, and I was in good spirits when we headed off to Manchester to get our flight.
The first part of our journey took us west along the A69, the main route that paralleled Hadrian’s Wall for much of its length. I hadn’t been out that way in the six months since Christmas. I kept my concentration on the road. I’d only recently been passed fit to drive, and like everything else in my new, pain-free life, being in charge of a car felt dangerously bright and intense. I knew Piers was keeping a subtle eye on me. His vigilance warmed me, just like the less subtle hand he was resting on my thigh. But I was fine. I no longer wanted to tailgate and dodge round every vehicle on the road ahead. Sailing down the sunny highway, my lover at my side, was enough for me.
A cricket match was taking place in the fields just west of Haltwhistle. I slowed up a bit. I liked to see a leisured country game being played on an afternoon like this. Sunlight on grass-stained whites, a small crowd gathered more for the beer and companionship than any deep interest in the scores… Familiar colours caught my eye. A board on the roadside announced that this was a charity match, a fundraiser by the local emergency volunteers. Air-sea rescue versus hill-and-cave, both sets of insignia and livery displayed outside the clubhouse.
I recognised the ranger who’d been minding the desk on that Boxing Day afternoon. He was in to bat. It was good to see him grinning, surrounded by his mates. Far off in the outfield, two other players caught my eye. They didn’t seem to be involved in the game, though they were resplendent—shining, almost—in their whites. One of them fair, one dark. I had almost driven past the pitch. At the last instant, each of them raised a hand and waved.
There was no convenient layby. I jammed my hazards on and pulled up onto the verge, stalled the car out and left her shuddering among the goldenrod and willowherbs she’d crushed. I put my face into my hands. “I don’t want it to come back,” I said. “It was all less bad than I thought it would be, and you were an angel, but…I can’t go through it again. The oncologist—Dr Ajay—she said it should never come back.”
The breeze stirred my hair. I’d been so relieved to see it grow back after my treatment that I hadn’t been along for my usual crewcut since. Piers had said he missed my velveteen, my short shag pile, but also that it was nice to have something to sink his fingers into…
I looked up. I’d been talking to an empty car. The passenger door was wide open. Twisting round in my seat, I saw Piers jogging back down the verge in the direction we’d come. He reached a gap in the hedgerow and stopped, shading his eyes. He watched for about twenty seconds, then he turned away.
I got out of the car to meet him. My legs felt like rubber and I had to watch my footing so as not to fall out into the traffic. I didn’t get much chance to observe him at distance these days. Even scared shitless, my heart racing painfully, I could see how magnificent he was. He’d put on a little weight—I had learned to cook, to his frequently expressed astonishment—and he’d started to hold himself straight and tall. Our rucksacks were ready on the car’s back seat. I wanted more life with him. I wanted more life.
He caught me by the shoulders and held me fast. “Gavin. Look at me.”
Where else was there for me to look? Sanity, health, joy and love were all bound up for me in his gold-flecked gaze, bound up and kept in trust.
“Two of them, right? One of them tall and dark, the other blond. Off in the outfield.” He shook me lightly. “Gav. You’re okay. I saw them too.”
“You saw them.”
“Yes. Not playing, more like…watching over the others, guarding them. I saw them wave to you.”
I laid my head on his shoulder. Piers had believed me without seeing, even after my encounter with the ranger six months before. Even after I’d been diagnosed with a bloody brain tumour. “But when you went back to look…”
Warm air from passing traffic buffeted us, and he wrapped his arms round me, drawing me away from the edge. “Nothing. They were gone.”
We clung together. Scents of sunwarmed earth rose up around us. He was shaking finely in my grasp. He was never going to lapse from his Catholicism any more than I was likely to convert, but our worlds had met somewhere in this shared visio
n and we both knew it. The boundaries of reality—of life and death—were not where either of us had placed them. Maybe they didn’t exist at all. Hope flooded me. I struggled back far enough to kiss my lover’s beautiful, astonished mouth, garnering a volley of hoots from a bunch of kids tearing past in a Volkswagen bus. Love didn’t even have to end with life. “Come on,” I said. “You’re either as mad as me or we’re both completely sane. I’m not sure it matters. And either way, sweetheart—let’s not miss our flight.”
About the Author
Harper Fox is a M/M author with a mission. She’s produced six critically acclaimed novels in a year and is trying to dispel rumours that she has a clone/twin sister locked away in a study in her basement. In fact she simply continues working on what she loves best—creating worlds and stories for the huge cast of lovely gay men queuing up inside her head. She lives in rural Northumberland in northern England and does most of her writing at a pensioned-off kitchen table in her back garden, often with blanket and hot water bottle.
She lives with her SO Jane, who has somehow put up with her for a quarter of a century now, and three enigmatic cats, chief among whom is Lucy, who knows the secret of the universe but isn’t letting on. When not writing, she either despairs or makes bread, specialities focaccia and her amazing seven-strand challah. If she has any other skills, she’s yet to discover them.
Baby, it’s cold outside…
A man receives the gift of pleasure at the hands of two expert lovers. Boyhood sweethearts get a second chance at romance. Two very proper gentlemen indulge their forbidden desires. A Christmas tree farmer has an epiphany. It may be cold outside, but these four holiday novellas will warm you up. Anthology includes:
My True Love Gave to Me by Ava March
Winter Knights by Harper Fox
Lone Star by Josh Lanyon
The Christmas Proposition by K.A. Mitchell
Stories also available for purchase separately.
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ISBN: 978-1-4268-9281-3
Copyright © 2011 by Harper Fox
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